“I Write Wedding Songs” is the sixth release by Human Potential - the solo project of Andrew Becker; an award-winning filmmaker and former drummer for both Dischord Records’ band, Medications, and Brooklyn provocateurs, Screens.

In 2023, following the release of his fifth record, “Hoosi, No!”, Becker resolved to create a follow up album that would aesthetically upend and melodically transgress his most recent batch of cosmic slop. But, after years of working in relative isolation, he decided to make a definitive procedural modification…to reach out beyond his secluded silo and seek out a delicate production hand that could help grease the erstwhile musical machine.

That spring, after many dead-end investigations, AB managed to track down old friend and peripatetic troubadour, L. Skell (creator of entombed classic, Eldridge Skell’s The Rude Staircase’s “Sookie Jump”), who had spent the weirder part of a decade skiff hopping throughout Central America, convincing him to abscond north of the border to embark on a hellishly phantasmagoric musical journey.

For months, the two holed up in Becker’s fetid Los Angeles biodome, reinvigorating old oddities, while ushering in entirely new paradigms of creation. In order to demystify a sketch Becker had been working on, the pair employed rigid parameters, limiting themselves to one hour of clandestine solo work on the song, before turning it back to the other to do the same, every hour, over the course of an entire day. The result was “Clear Notes for a New National Anthem”, a jiggy ditty that flops and seizes before nose diving into the bawdy bowels of a Wichita disco. “Cut Worm Forgets the Plow” swaths a synth-pop anthem in a sampledelic glaze, while “A Witch for Charlemagne” oozes no wave leakage over mellifluous peacocking. The poptones of “You Only Love What You Can Lose” is preordained to breach the steadfast emotional dams of the black-hearted, while title track, “I Write Weddings Songs” leads the listener on an illusory montage of lost loves and derelict dreams before climbing safely into the saddle of its idyllic climax. Before it was all said and done, Becker had brought other contributors into the fold, including former Screens bandmate (and Apes singer) Breck Brunson, as well as vocalist Amira Nader, who imprinted the proceedings with their inimitable melodic stylings.

Like all previous Human Potential album art, Becker dove into his personal archives for inspiration, this time pulling an image captured at his parents’ wedding reception many decades ago. The juxtaposition of the celebratory union with the divorce that would upend the marriage some years later, embodies the idea that memories, moments and life-defining songs shift tonally with the ebbs and flows that chart our existence. So it goes.

Alas, “I Write Wedding Songs” is perhaps the most sonically sensuous and bafflingly palatable Human Potential album to date - a chimerical flavor rainbow of glistening, grimy, grandiose pop that inhales darkly and seethes brightly, welcoming all listeners to a shady place where joy and heartbreak dance together in a moonlit tidepool of teetering radiance.

“I Write Wedding Songs”, released on Becker’s own What Delicate Recordings, is out now.